free ebooks...

This has been one of those busy weeks when I note just how quickly time passes.  Here it is Wednesday already, and while I'd love to be watching football, that's tomorrow night.  Right now, I just want to get to grips with it already being the middle of the week!

I last blogged on Sunday; since then Bob's Green Bay Packers walloped the Minnesota Vikings, Bob and I traveled to San Francisco to meet with the new surgeon; the big day is in early December, and we can't wait!  Three massive loads of wash have been attended, also grocery shopping.  Now there's clean clothes and food to eat.  Oh and writing.  I hit 50K on Penny Angel, which felt so good after all that's been swirling.  I'll finish that novel on Saturday, then dive right back into For God And Country, languishing on the back burner.  Never again will I attempt writing concurrently.  I just don't have the brain cells for it anymore.

It's been a strange November, not as NaNo-focused as usual.  It's been about my husband, goiters (man am I tired of typing that word), publishing.  This is my first NaNo as an indie author, and I've been editing in addition to writing, Alvin's Farm hacked due to reading it on my iTouch.  If you have any way to revise using an e-reader, I highly recommend it.  Nothing like seeing a 'finished' version of one's novel to point out glaring unnecessary prose I'll say!

So yeah, publishing.  I'm publishing, and have decided to give away my ebooks.  It came about as things usually do around here, Bob and I chatting about something else completely, then WHAM!  Like a brick up my head; he was mentioning a singer from an indie band of our youth, an interview she gave to one of his UK music magazines.  She was asked about the perils of illegal downloading and answered: Music should always have been free.  Making money out of it is what has created these quasi-televangelist rock stars.

Throwing Muses' Kristin Hersh goes on to say...  What has been killing music, what has devalued it, is style over substance.  The industry might not have collapsed had they not decided that only lowest common denominator bull$*#& would make money and was worth investing in.

Change music to books and the same can be said, although traditional publishing isn't dead yet.  But it's not getting better either.

This was a week ago, after the whole goiter-made-me-sick afternoon.  This goiter has changed my writing life, my publishing ideas.  I went indie due to its invasive presence, now I've gone off the deep end, so to speak.  Between Bob's enlarged thyroid and a vocalist, I've decided not to charge for ebooks, for a few reasons.

One, I am not a capitalist.  The older I get, those eleven years in Britain mean more to me than I thought possible.  I miss the NHS, the BBC, tea.  Tea doesn't have much to do with capitalism, but it sure is English, and my economic heart lies across the Atlantic in a country not quite as obsessed as mine for making money.

Two, an ebook is a file.  Yes, it's a novel that I spent many hours on, but it just doesn't carry the same weight in my heart as a book does.  A wholly personal feeling, but one I can't ignore.

Three, and this isn't in the manifesto; I don't want to be a hypocrite.  I have only bought one ebook, Tales For Canterbury.  All the rest of my ebooks are novels and memoirs in the public domain.  To put it another way, I won't spend money on a book unless it is a book, an actual hard or paperback BOOK.  Ultimately, I can't ask readers to spend their hard-earned money on my digital files if I won't do so myself.

Whew!  I hope you weren't expecting this to be brief.  If you were, I apologize.  It wasn't to do with how the books were selling; it was this smack up the head of what am I trying to do with this very small, very subtle manner of publishing my novels.  Money was never a factor, it was time.  Time is precarious, it slips like a breath.  It's already Wednesday, heck, it's nearly Thursday for me.  I'll go to bed once I clean this up; by then it will be after eight p.m.  I'm forty-five, have nearly written that many books.  I have loads of novels, an incredible blessing.  This whole writing gig is one of the biggest joys of my life.  More than I can express, and how to put a price on bliss?

I can't.  If I do, I'm a hypocrite.  If I do, it's like assigning a cost to each of my kids; what is Thea worth, Bud, Jay?  If I do, it's like belittling a gift, it's like...

It's like doing something so against my nature.  I don't write to sell books.  I write because I have more plot than good sense.  I have plenty of ideas, plenty of time to write them, and as long as Bob has plenty of paychecks, I'll sit quietly and write, edit, publish.  I'm living the dream, as my brother loves to tell me.  It doesn't carry a price tag, and now neither do my ebooks.